Saturday, 14 July 2018

I
have been expecting them, and have washed myself and laid out the garment in
which I am to be married – a gown as grey as the dawn, as light and wispy as
the clouds. I let them dress me in it, and when they are done, I stand back,
and thank them briefly, in words as steeped in ritual as the visit and the
dressing.

“Go well,” they say in response, in a chant
they have rehearsed, the chant I have also used when sending our other sister
out on her wedding day. “Go well, and come back in full bloom. Go out grey as
ash and come back as red as a flower. Do you promise?”

“I promise,” I reply. Then each of them
touches me, briefly, and leaves. Soon I am alone, and free to go.

But before I go, I have one more thing to
do. One of my sisters has not visited me – it is she who was married the last
time. Now she is great with child, and lies on her pallet in her room. Before
leaving, I decide, I will go and see her.

She raises a tired head and smiles wanly
when I enter. “I thought you would be gone by now.”

“I did not want to go without seeing you.”
I look down at her. “It’s going to be in a day or two, right?”

“Maybe even today,” she says. “I can feel
the movements.” She gestures invitingly towards her swollenness, inviting me to
feel, too.

I do not want to touch. Her skin is pale,
stretched so tight that it’s almost translucent. It reminds me of wax. But it
was I who had come to see her, and she would be hurt if I didn’t do this simple
thing. So I bend and touch, forcing myself not to flinch. Things seem to crawl
and bump inside her. “Are you happy?” I ask curiously. It is a question I’m not
really supposed to ask, but she and I were always close, closer than sisters
really should be.

“Happy?” She shrugs tiredly. “It needs to
happen, because the future must go on. How does it matter if I’m happy? But of
course...” she smiles again. “Of course I’m not telling you not to be happy
when your turn comes.”

I do not say anything for a moment. I want
to go, but at the same time I do not want to leave her. Nor does she look as
though she wants me to go. After all, there is still time. “Do you want male or
female children?” she asks eventually.

I do not have to think about this. “Oh,
female, definitely,” I respond immediately. “Males are such silly, useless
things.”

“But we need them, don’t we?” she says, laughing
breathlessly. “Need them for...” she points to the swollen mound of herself.
“For this?”

“Perhaps someday we can do without them,” I
tell her.

“Perhaps,” she agrees. “But not now, not in
our lifetimes.” She looks very tired suddenly. “Go now. Your groom must be
waiting for you. Go and come back red and in full bloom.”

I leave. On the way out I see none of my
other sisters. They have work to do, all of them, as I had work until today.
Only on our wedding day, and afterwards, do we not work.

At the entrance, one of my sisters has left
a small sealed pot for me, tiny enough to hold in my fist. It is still warm. My
sisters will have squeezed out the essence into the pot, drop by drop, for me.
It is not necessary, but I feel a great surge of affection for them for taking
the trouble.

The morning is heavy and grey, the air
humid and pressing down with no breeze. It is not marrying weather. It is not
the weather I would have chosen. Fortunately, I know the way I must go, where
my groom will be waiting for me. Once, long ago, I would have had to trust to
fortune. No longer.

The path is only a smudge in the ground,
but easier to my feet than the ground around, strewn with thorn and stones. The
trees hang heavily overhead, drooping almost to the ground under the weight of
leaves and branches. I can see the river through them. It looks in this light
like a stretch of grey mud.

From here, if I look back, I could see my
home – mine and that of my sisters. It is the only home I have ever known, the
only home I will ever know. With every step, I can feel its pull on me. I fight
down the urge to look back, because if I do, I may be unable to resist the urge
to turn around and go back. I cannot do that. It is my duty to marry, as it
will be that of every one of my sisters in her turn.

The path turns to the left, towards the
river. Here is the stone platform, worn by age, where I will wait. I do not
know what it was built for, originally, or by whom; I have no idea how many
marriages it has witnessed. The only one that will matter to me is my own.

The river is slow, and bears a smell with
it, a smell of mud and rotting vegetation, and other things. I have heard that
the river comes from a long way away, from the blue mountains on the distant
horizon, which I will never visit. Perhaps my groom has. Males wander far, as
they must.

Methodically, I prepare myself. There is no
wind, so I do not have to orient myself towards it. Opening the pot, I take out
the oily liquid within and smear myself with it. My sisters have made it for me
– I would not want their efforts to go to waste. The smell of it hangs in the
air, overpowering that of the river. If there was wind it would have carried it
away, but there is not the slightest breath of a breeze. The smell is
soporific; the pot slips from my grasp and shatters to fragments on the stone.
No matter; the amount I have smeared on myself will more than suffice.

I can feel his presence now, in the
rustling of branches, the light cracking of a twig. He is not here yet, but he
is coming.

Kneeling on the stone, I bow my head, as I
have been taught, and wait.

It is not right for a bride to look at her
groom; I have been always told this, from the first moment I was old enough to
know that someday I must marry. Why it should be so, I have never been told,
and never asked; but now, listening to the noise of him coming through the
bushes, faster now, faster and closer, I suddenly know.

A bride must not look upon her groom so
that she does not take fright and run away.

A rush, a high pitched shriek, and he is
upon me.

Even though I have prepared for this
moment, he almost knocks me over with his weight. I can feel him on me,
scraping and clawing away my filmy grey garment. He is so inflamed by my scent,
and that of my sisters, that he cannot at first find the back of my neck, which
I have bared to him. Then I feel his claws digging into my skin, sharp as
knives, and the stinging pain as his organ cuts through the back of my neck and
into me.

Crouching under his weight, bowed almost to
the stone, I wait and feel him on me, inside me, hot and burning and throbbing.

The river eddies by, with its mud and
leaves and its scents from places I will never see, which I will never know. I
watch it pass, and endure.

At last it is over. With a final convulsive
throb, he rolls off my back and on to the stone. I can feel him thrashing
around, weakly, already in his death throes. Males are weak creatures. They are
born for only one purpose, and once that is done, they do not live long.

I could look at him now, if I wanted. I
could put him out of his misery, as my sister had done with her husband. But I do neither. I only
want one thing, now, and that is to go home.

Discarding the tattered remnants of my grey
wedding garment, I turn back along the path. The blood from my wounds runs down
my body, dripping on the ground, painting it as I go. The blood will clot, soon
enough. It will need to, to preserve what I carry within me now.

Yes, they are already squirming through my
veins and pulsing arteries, the seed my already dying husband has planted
within me. They are seeking out my
seed, and merging with them, and soon they will settle down inside me, to feed.
To feed and to grow, and grow, and grow.

And soon, soon, they will be ready to
emerge into the world. They will be desperate to be born, and they will make
their own way out, with teeth and claws, ripping through the swollen, translucent
bag that will be my body. They will bear with them the only message that means
anything in this world, or on any other.

Life is the only thing that matters. By any
means possible, no matter what it has to do, life will go on.

I can see my home now, my home and my
sisters’, which will be the home of my children. I left in grey, and I am
coming back red in my blood, and in bloom, as I had promised to do. Soon, I
will bear fruit, and bring life into the world.

My sisters must have seen me. Soon it will
be their turn. I can hear their voices, raised in welcome.